One More Reason Now
by PoisonComeUndone
Summary: movie!verse When Tony finds a baby at the front door of the mansion, it's assumed it's some sort of trick, and sure, it is. But biologically, the baby's fathers are none other than Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. from a kinkmeme prompt


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Tony's used to a lot of things these days that he never would've expected. Living with a group of superheroes who're pretty much penned up in the mansion like kenneled dogs when they're not out on a mission, that was kind of inevitable. Hardly a day went by without Thor breaking some sort of appliance, and Barton seemed to think the answer to everything around the house that didn't suit him was to shoot it. All things considered, life at Avengers headquarters was a crazy fucked up mess that had only been further complicated the moment Loki was brought into the mix. Even if he was technically on their side, supposedly, he had yet to do anything but hang around headquarters doing shit like turning fruit into fruit bats on human contact, because of course that's how _everyone_ needs to start their morning, a live bat in hand after they thought they'd picked up an orange. Tony's bar for 'weird' had pretty much ratcheted sky high, which says a lot considering he didn't exactly live the most normal life to begin with.

When he stepped out onto the porch and almost on top of a baby, all of that was a large bit of what ran through his head, because after everything else, his own surprise was frankly surprising. But still, there's hearing a god argue the validity of using twitter to broadcast war cries("In my country, a battle cry is essential as a sign of unification! We must show our solidarity as S.H.I.E.L.D. brothers by publicly declaring our joint actions!"), and then there's stepping out onto your own front porch to find a _baby_ in a fluffy teddy bear blanket.

Tony blinked, kept his hold on the door frame and looked down at the little thing on the welcome mat. Definitely still there, definitely still wrapped in a soft yellow blanket with what looked like dancing teddies. Some of them had top hats. Blinking, so far, was the best he had. She hadn't been crying, before, but opening the door had clearly disturbed her tentative grasp on that(weren't babies constantly on the verge of tears? It was like some perpetual volatile titration…you never knew which drop would send the reaction over the edge.). She squirmed, opened her mouth on a little whine, and Tony was forced to concede that yeah, _real_ baby, and he was just standing there staring at her like an idiot.

"Well, this is new."

He'd never had much experience with babies. Alright, honestly, he'd had _zero_ experience with babies, unless you counted the numerous photos he'd taken with them as he took a second or two to pose with members of the adoring public, and he'd put his arm around one or two whose parents had wanted their kid up close with the great Iron Man, but his practical knowledge about them was probably somewhere in the negatives. He'd never even picked one up.

When he bent down to get her, his hands fit around the bundle surprisingly easy. She was light as a feather, and probably about half of her apparent size was nothing more than blanket. She was positively _tiny_, couldn't be but barely older than a newborn, though she was old enough to no longer look like a squinting naked rat. She had dark hair, and wide blue eyes that were honestly absolutely gorgeous.

"Well I can tell you one thing, looks like you're a knockout in the making. Just saying, eyes like that, it won't be that hard getting your way. Course if they change, you're screwed."

She squirmed even more restlessly than she had on the ground, another soft, quavering almost cry slipping from her little mouth. Jesus, what was it about crying kids that just instilled such a spark of anxiety? He'd tried to never give much thought to whether or not he wanted any(though as a philosophy that had failed far more than once. Typically, alcohol was involved.), but even without considering his own potential(or lack thereof) for fatherhood, there had always been something about the sound of crying children that grated at him in a way that was more helpless than irritated. Even that didn't really bode well as a topic for thought.

He tried to shut it out and shut her up in one stroke, pulling her in a little hesitantly against his chest. It seemed to help a little, though she had now added waving one free little arm around to her squirming routine. Standing in the open doorway holding her like she was going to vanish off to wherever she'd come from any second was gonna achieve all of nothing, so he pulled all the way back inside and shut the door, keeping her tucked with one arm against his chest. The squirms were getting more pronounced, her cries almost becoming fully fledged, and he stopped by the door to type a quick code into JARVIS's interface. There might have been things that sucked about having turned over one of his own properties for headquarters, but one amazing one was having nearly absolute control over the security systems. It came in hand for lots of things, like tripping not so silent alarms in the bedrooms that'd have most members of the team staggering into the room within a few minutes, give or take. Or so he was guessing. Either that, or everyone'd figure out how to turn it off, and hey, if he'd been in that situation, knowing himself he'd probably just have turned it off too.

In the meantime, he put the baby down, wedging her between two pillows on the couch. She finally actually cried, smacking futilely at the blanket around her with a tiny waving fist as tears welled up in her eyes. _Shit_.

"Hey, I'm sorry! I'm sorry, ok, but I don't know what you want from me here, kid. I don't even know what you're _doing_ here, so pardon me if I don't- Oh, hey, Steve." There were a lot of reasons he'd taken to cooking breakfast, and the guy shuffling across the tile toward him was absolutely all of them. Well, most of them. He _had_ liked the tiny slice of almost solitude some mornings, but he liked even more that Mr. Army Early Bird over there didn't sleep in anything other than pajama pants and didn't bother to wear much else to breakfast either. It was a thin white shirt or, on a couple of very rare occasions when he'd caught him off guard(like now), no shirt at all, and he stood there by the counter, eyes that hadn't been open quite long enough yet raking over the conjoined rooms as he tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

"…is that a _baby_?"

"Either that or a _really_ good ruse, but I'm not exactly sure what good Trojan Baby here could possibly do anyone, so I'm gonna go with yes, I think it's an actual baby."

"Where'd you…aren't you going to pick her up?" Not that Steve waited for him to do it, if he had been going to(which, he totally hadn't. He'd done that once already, thanks, and that was enough.). Steve didn't even give him a chance though, just crossed the last feet over to the sofa and scooped her up in those ridiculously big arms. When he did it there was nothing awkward about it, no moment of holding her out in the air like a stick of nitro, just a swift sweeping movement that brought her in to be cradled against him. He wiped her tears away with this thumb, shushed and rocked and soothed with a gentleness in those hands that some people would've had to see to believe. Tony could've kept seeing it for a lot longer himself, but that one fell under the heading of 'difficult to explain'. Shaking himself a little, he cast a look down the hall. No one else coming yet.

Steve was doing his damn best to get her quiet, now stroking her cheek carefully as he rocked her in the crook of one arm. It looked so simple it was almost nauseating. At least, that's the feeling he kept telling himself he _should've_ been having. Honestly, it felt more like a spastic tightening in his chest than anything else.

He was anticipating a crash or a thud or something as Thor yanked up Mjolnir and came to join them but it was Natasha who showed up next, jeans and a t-shirt pulled on though her hair was ruffled with sleep. She stopped in the doorway, leaning against the frame as her arms crossed over her chest.

"Where's the fire, Tony?"

He gestured at Steve and his now quieting little bundle, speaking up when that clearly didn't make it clear enough. "That! Something tripped the porch alarm but none of the others, I opened the door thinking hey, maybe the knocker fell off or something, the way Thor treats the thing I wouldn't be surprised, but then I open the door and nearly step on _that_."

Natasha wasn't fazed. Her eyebrows rose just a little as she studied them, shaking her head as she pushed off from the frame. "And you find it shocking someone left a baby here? Can hardly be your first." She muttered the last bit under breath as she turned, and it didn't exactly _sting_ but it wasn't like he could let her just say it and walk away, either.

"Whoa, hey, hey, back it up, here. You think she's _mine_?" Because no, there was…well, ok, yeah, there were _plenty_ of ways she could've been his, except that he _really_ seriously doubted it. He was careful, most of the time, and the times he'd been drunk enough that he couldn't remember if he'd been protected or not were few and far between.

"I think the law of averages isn't in your favor on this one, yeah. I also think I'm going back to bed, and if you pull that alarm again when there's not actually an emergency, you'll regret it."

So much for motherly instinct. Or helping him in any respect, really, because now Steve was studying him with eyes that seemed just a little accusatory. Or maybe more than little.

"Tony, you don't think-"

"That Natasha might have a point? Shockingly, everything that goes on around here doesn't have something to do with me. If the kid was mine I'd be hearing about it from my lawyers, not through delivery." That much, he'd always been sure of. If he did get some girl pregnant, it was a given they'd be taking him for every cent they possibly could. "Seriously, this is just…c'mere, c'mere and look at this." Because everything else aside, there was _no way_ some random woman had gotten past _his_ security. Certainly not with all the additions he'd made to the mansion since it became headquarters.

With a snap of his fingers he pulled up a screen in the living room, shuffled around a bit until he got the data points displayed that he wanted. "This is where the alarm tripped. I was sticking bread in the toaster. It's just the porch. Everything in between from there to the gate hasn't been touched, so unless mother dear can materialize on the front porch, then-"

"By this point you shouldn't be ruling that out as a possibility."

Coulson's voice came from the hall, and Tony looked up to see him making his way over, fastening the right hand cuff of his shirt. He had to give it to him, even this early, the man looked pretty damn sharp and not at all like he'd yanked his clothes off the floor five minutes ago, though that was Tony's best bet. Fury had said Coulson would be staying with them for awhile until Loki was determined a stable member of the team. Tony was pretty sure it had less to do with Loki's dangers and more to do with the somewhat under the radar relationship he seemed to have going with Clint Barton, but he was holding that card to pull out when he thought it might do him some good. Right now, probably not so much.

"That'd be quite the talent. Pretty sure I'd remember hooking up with-"

"Captain, if you'd hand it over?" Coulson's hands were already out, expectant and impatient, though Steve was a lot less eager.

"She's quieted down. I think she's-"

"We'll deal with it." From his pocket, Coulson pulled the radio he kept within near constant reach. Tony'd wondered how that went for him on is off hours, if he kept it by the bed when he had sex. If it ever got shot, he'd have his answer. "Security?"

Through crackling static, Tony could barely make out their affirmative response.

"I need men up here now to take custody of a possibly dangerous specimen. We'll need transport to the lab waiting; I'll be accompanying."

"Sir, if you don't mind, I don't really think dangerous is…" Steve cut his eyes away, already backing down even though Coulson hadn't so much as glared at him. He was still all soldier, too much respect for the chain of command to feel comfortable openly questioning it, even if he had proven himself more than willing to defy it before. "Don't you think we should be getting her to a hospital? Trying to find her mother?"

If there was any sympathy in him for that point of view, Coulson didn't show it. "Any further steps we take will have to be decided once we know what's going on. Honestly, Captain, we can't even be sure this is human."

When he left Steve kept watching the door, something in his eyes somewhere between kicked puppy and distressed protector. In the kitchen, Tony slammed the loudest cabinet shut, eager to distract him.

"Hey, what do you want in your omlet? I didn't exactly get to get started before the whole baby crisis. I was thinking some toast, maybe a little grilled chicken in the omelet, I think Bruce…you even hearing me, buddy?" It was a toss-up, because while Steve was usually pretty good at listening, he still looked distracted as hell.

"Aren't you…what if she's just a kid, Tony? I mean you heard Coulson, talking about her like she's just a lab experiment, what if she's really just a kid and they're gonna do God knows what trying to figure it out?" Most of the time, this kind of thing was endearing. Hell, he'd given away staggering amounts of money after he'd come in one night to a too serious Steve watching an infomercial with starving children and talking about how he couldn't turn it off after he'd seen the pictures, and they had just about every stray cat within a hundred miles it seemed coming to their backyard feeding station these days, but…

Maybe he was more worried about Natasha's talk of odds than he was willing to admit, or maybe it had more to do with everything about the way Steve had looked standing half naked in his living room rocking a baby, but he did _not_ want to talk about the kid anymore. She was out the door and Coulson's to deal with, for better or worse. Morning's adventure completed.

"Jesus, Steve, he's not a monster. The kid, on the other hand, just might be." He sliced off a couple pats of butter, watched them sizzle in the pan he'd started heating on the stove. Steve still hadn't moved any closer, was still watching the door like he might should be heading out of it. "I seriously doubt they're gonna start with chopping her head or something, c'mon. They'll figure it out, and we'll hear about it, and if we don't, it's about time I figured out if I could hack that lab software of theirs anyway."

Something in Steve's shoulder eased at that, and he _finally_(thank God) gave up his vigil on the door and came into the kitchen to lean on the island and watch Tony cook. "That'd be great, Tony. Thanks."

"Hey, anytime." Seriously. If anything he could pull off would keep Steve hanging out with him, he'd be happy to do it. Half the time they seemed to almost be becoming friends, but then he'd do something like get drunk and break a small fortune testing a new robot component and Steve would give him this look that left little doubt as to what he thought about Tony's moral inadequacy. It was a weird middle ground, but he tried not to think too much about it, was mostly just happy at the moments he was skating on the right side of paper thin ice.

If nothing else, it gave him a chance to _look_. Right now Steve was gorgeous, leaning on black marble that was almost shiny enough to properly reflect his bare chest and…

"Sir, I would recommend flipping your omelet before the bottom is entirely burnt." Smart ass.

"When I want your opinion on my cooking, JARVIS, I'll ask for it." He flipped the omelet anyway, minded the intrusion a little less when Steve smiled.

By the time Clint came into the kitchen in an irritable mood, he was in too good of one to mind.

'''''''''''''''''

"Sir, Agent Coulson has been trying to summon you for the past 15 minutes."

Tony didn't even look up from his work, eyes still tracking over the diagram he'd thrown together for a new robot to go around the house checking for and repairing damage. He might be hard on his own stuff sometimes, true, but having the rest of the team in the house had become tantamount to a wrecking crew.

"Thought I told you to stall him."

"I have been stalling him, sir, but he knows you're home and I'm afraid he insists his business is important."

"Isn't everyone's. Tell him that-"

"He says it is about the child, sir, and he wishes to speak with you and the Captain directly."

That might be worth tearing himself away from the work for, at least. If the kid was intended as some kind of alien filtration, Steve was almost guaranteed to be pretty upset about it. Yeah, that was worth hauling his ass upstairs for. He put his tools down, dusted off his hands on the back of his jeans before heading upstairs.

"I'm not sure this wheel hookup is gonna be the best option. While I'm gone run me some projections using the second blueprints."

"Yes sir."

Upstairs, he'd barely stepped into the living room before a couple of those damn S.H.I.E.L.D. goons were all over him, stretching his right arm out and jabbing a needle just below the crease of his elbow.

"_Hey_!" The struggling was pretty worthless because it lasted all of a handful of seconds(not to mention that without the suit, he was far easier than he'd like to be to restrain), and the released him only when they had a small vial of blood to pull away with them.

Steve held up his own arm, showing off a blank canvas of skin that had probably held a mark a few minutes before. "It's ok, Tony, they got me too."

"And he was noticeably more cooperative. I think you'd find, Mr. Stark, that if you even tried to make my life a little less difficult, I might be willing to make yours a little easier."

"I think you're just a sadist, personally. How'd you get this job, anyway? I mean, how do you even start to advertise for a position like that? Wanted, superhero contact, heartless cruelty strongly desired? I mean, what did you-"

"Just take a seat, Stark."

At the side, the guy decked out in what seemed like almost too much Kevlar had handed Tony's blood off to someone else, a guy in a lab coat who was feeding the sample into a computer fitted inside his briefcase. Tony sauntered over to where Steve leaned against the back of the sofa with his arms crossed, and he took his place next to him. "So, what'd he tell you?"

Steve shrugged, shaking his head. "Not much. Just that they needed to retest our blood, something about a possible security risk."

"…the kind of security risk that results in babies left on doorsteps? Cause I'm not seeing the connection here, especially because unless there's some serious gaps in what we know about you, you were still under hard freeze 9 months ago. Unless by hard freeze they meant-"

"_Tony_." He hissed the word under his breath, the tips of his ears reddening. Before Steve, Tony would've been willing to bet that it was impossible for the whole blushing virgin act to be attractive on a man. It's a bet he obviously would've lost. Somehow, Steve managed to make his obvious lack of experience ridiculously entrancing.

The computer beeped, and the man in the lab coat shook his head, his lips set in a thin line. "No change, sir. Original results confirmed."

For just a minute something in Tony's stomach dropped. That could mean a lot of things, but the forerunner had to be that maybe Natasha was right, _fuck_, maybe he'd been careless, maybe he'd…

He wasn't ready for this, not in any form or fashion and…no. He just wasn't ready.

Tony cleared his throat, pushed off the couch to head in the direction of the screen. Computers he knew. "What results? Look, if there's something we've been exposed to that-"

"I need to speak to both of you. In private." Coulson directed the last bit at guy still hovering over his briefcase computer, and he shut it with a sharp click, hustling out of the room with the guards on his heels. That left them alone with Coulson…or rather, _almost_ alone, because when Coulson moved it was plain the baby was there too, sleeping behind him on a couch cushion. There was bandage wrapped around the inside of her little arm. He could still remember the sharp bite of the needle that had left him bruised and Tony's hands convulsed, tightening until his nails dug into his palms.

"It seems that we have an unprecedented situation, gentlemen. This was almost certainly brought about by someone set on causing a rift among the team, however the identity of the guilty villain has yet to be determined. So far we know only that the child is yours."

Oh God. Tony's head couldn't afford to reel right now, it just couldn't. He dug his hands into his pockets. "Hate to break it to you, Coulson, but despite my connections not everything comes down to the suit. Well, it might have been related to the suit, but-"

"You misunderstood me, Stark. This child, she's not just yours. She's _yours_." He gestured between them, his expression still disturbingly unaffected. "We ran the tests more than once. She's utterly human, and she is clearly a biological offspring to both of you. While we don't know the means, the result is clear. She's your daughter."

Everything, _everything_ in Tony's head wanted to explode.

"…excuse me? You do realize that not only is that physically impossible, we've never-"

"As I said, we don't understand it. It is, however, absolutely true."

If _he_ was a mask of shock, he was pretty sure he had nothing on Steve. The man looked like he'd just seen about a thousand ghosts, all wearing his own face. He raked a hand through his hair, swallowed hard as he tried to find his way. "I…but who would…is she…" He took a deep breath, his shoulders squaring just a little more. "She's alright? Other…other than the fact that this shouldn't have been possible, she's healthy?"

"She seems to show unusual development for her age that could be consistent with the effects your serum might have had if you'd been exposed to it as an infant, but none of it seems unnatural. She's perfectly healthy."

Steve nodded, taking it in like that was all he'd wanted to know, all he needed to know. Everything Tony needed right then involved the door. He had to leave, he had to think, he had to get the suit, he had to do _anything_ that got him the fuck out of this room. Except that apparently, Coulson wasn't finished.

He shuffled a stack of folded papers out of the inside of his coat, smoothing out the creases in his hand. "Though we obviously have no idea of the full motives behind this, we can only assume their intent was to insert a source of dissention within the team. Considering the child is full human, other than the likelihood that she has inherited some of the Captain's abilities she isn't a significant threat. There are homes, places S.H.I.E.L.D. could place her that-"

"_No_!" "Absolutely out of the question." Tony's heart skipped, and for just a second his eyes met with Steve's before Steve looked away. On this one thing then, at least they were in agreement. The fallout from this was guaranteed to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and he wasn't saying he was cut out to be taking her to daycare or anything, but she wasn't leaving this house. He knew what it was like to grow up with a father who shuttled him off to every other place he could find that would take him, and he'd be damned if he was gonna do the same. His head was clamoring with every reason why he shouldn't, absolutely _couldn't_ be a father, but somehow the loudest was still the one that told him that if he was, if this had happened, the very least he could do was make sure no one sent her away. He could still remember all too well how that felt, mailing postcards from school to a father that almost certainly never even read them before he chucked them in the trash. No. He couldn't, not for anything.

But he couldn't stay in this room another minute, either. "Forget it, Coulson, she stays."

"I think you should consider that with both of your current activities-"

"I think it should be obvious at this point I'm quite capable of hiring staff. Pretty damn good at it, actually, or at least Pepper is, the last one I hired turned out to be a secret agent but hey, who's counting." He turned, heading back toward his lab and his cars and his suit and _distance_, calling back over his shoulder, "I'm on it. Forget the papers."

"Tony-" That voice was Steve's, and a little harder to ignore, but he kept walking anyway.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''

A lot of things really did work like mathematical functions, especially if you were looking for the signs. There had been a definite curve, for instance, to the increase in questions he'd received about potential fatherhood since Tony had passed 35. Where it was once a question he'd gotten occasionally it had become almost a staple, women's magazines in particular being overly fond of asking him if he had any plans for fatherhood, if he intended to raise children to carry on the family business. His answers had been varied, usually vague and never serious, because that wasn't a topic he was willing to discuss with himself, much less the press. The consensus of all of those half answers, though, had been that Tony was too busy for children, and he hadn't taken it under serious consideration. Much like it usually was, the truth was far more complicated.

Even if you _might_ have wanted it, it was hard to consider fatherhood when your only example had left you with what was likely a fair sized list of lingering psychological effects. Fuck, even in the animal kingdom just about every creature out there raised their young by example. To be honest, he'd kind of always assumed that if it was a choice between raising kids by example and not having them at all, he didn't really _have_ a choice. Whatever other unspeakable things he'd be willing to do, he'd never inflict that on another person so long as he lived.

Maybe that was why some lions ate their cubs, to save them from the inevitable failure. "Hey, kid, I know I suck, so let me just get the damage done before you're old enough to realize it."

The problem, though, came with the fact that wants weren't exactly logical. Tony didn't need kids, he wasn't _good_ for kids, but that didn't mean he didn't have a hell of a lot of sympathy for them, sometimes, and it didn't mean he didn't _want_ them. Wants were different, irrational and impossible to control. If he was strictly analytical about it, it might not even be so much of a 'want' as it was just another manifestation of his desire to prove that he could be everything Howard hadn't been, father included, but when he let himself even hastily examine the sneaking desire, it seemed like far more of a senseless want than a stubborn urge.

Ironically enough, really, it had been on his mind lately more than he cared to admit, because while _he_ wasn't the fatherly type, Steve practically _glowed_ with it. He was good and strong and noble, warm and open and freely loving. Everything he knew he never would be. There was about a dozen reasons he wanted him, and a couple concrete ones that absolutely told him he couldn't have him, but all the same, that had wormed its way into his mind, one more tick on the checklist. With Steve, he could've had a family because then at least one of them wouldn't fail horrifically at it.

By the time his mind worked around to that, to acknowledging that it was something that had already been crossing his mind with increasing frequency, everything tumbled together in a crash. Watching Steve in the yard with the cats, with a kid he'd pulled from a burning building, writing a check in his kitchen for the stupid starving kid infomercial people.

Other than himself and Steve, the only constant between the events was that Loki had been there. Every. Single. Time.

In midflight over the Atlantic, Tony swung the suit into a 180 and put on a burst of speed as he headed back home.

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